The Beauty and Benefits of Carpet
Flooring shapes more than your space’s style. It influences comfort, sound, and even indoor air quality. That full experience is part of the beauty of carpet: bringing together design, performance, and a healthier indoor environment with one thoughtful choice.
Carpet is A Smart Flooring Choice for Indoor Air Quality
When it comes to flooring, it’s important to consider indoor air quality. Everyday activities from walking, playing, working, and relaxing can stir up dust and tiny particles in our homes and offices. These particles, made up of things like dirt, pollen, and allergens, can affect indoor air quality. And the type of flooring you choose matters in maintaining healthy indoor air quality.
Recently, The Carpet and Rug Institute (CRI) asked Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health (CTEH), a third-party environmental testing laboratory, to update and confirm prior air particulate studies (also known as an Indoor Air Quality Test) to determine how carpet and solid-surface flooring affect the amount of dust that stays in the breathing zone and how quickly those particles settle back to the floor’s surface. To learn more about the scientific testing parameters, click here.
What We Found Out
The Indoor Air Quality Test found that when comparing carpet to solid-surface flooring, carpet helps manage dust more effectively than solid surface flooring. Solid surface floors allow dust to sit loosely on the surface. Each step or activity can send those particles back into the air repeatedly. Carpet works differently. It captures dust at its base instead of allowing it to circulate through the air and into breathing zones. Carpet helps prevent the dust particles from staying airborne and reduces repeated re-circulation of particles into the air. Regular vacuuming allows those particles to be easily removed for the carpet.
The Bottom Line
The softness of carpet not only feels good under foot, it helps manage dust rather than spread it. Carpet doesn’t add to the dust in your home, it helps control it. By holding particles in place instead of allowing them to constantly re-enter the air, choosing carpet as your flooring of choice not only provides improved acoustics, outstanding aesthetics and comfort, it also helps support healthy indoor air quality.
